The present invention relates to mobile computing devices, and more specifically, to document sharing in mobile devices.
New-generation mobile devices such as smartphones have become increasingly popular. Compared to mobile devices a few years ago, these new-generation mobile devices have better processing power, more RAM and storage memory, a screen with higher resolution, and higher communication bandwidth (e.g., 3G and WiFi). Many business software applications have been written that target smartphones as a key running platform.
In file sharing software systems, a first user may use a mobile device to view the content of a remote document. The first user may also invite other users to view the same content that this first user is viewing, but on their respective mobile devices. The first user, being the initiator of the shared viewing process, may control what pages to view and use zoom/pan functions to change image resolution and navigate the viewable areas within a page. The shared viewing process may be synchronized such that the viewing content changes resulted from the first user's zoom/pan actions are propagated across the mobile devices for all participants. The first user may also delegate the controller role to a second user.
This class of software system facilitates close collaboration among multiple users over a document. Users can be at remote locations yet still able to view and share documents with other mobile users. This class of software system helps improve business productivity.
The shared document viewing is achieved by first running the rich document software to display the document, and then using screen sharing software to share the displayed images across the network. Mobile devices though much improved over those a few years ago, still lacks the computing power, the RAM and storage memory, and consistent high-bandwidth communication of a desktop or laptop computer. As a result, applications that process rich documents, are targeted towards traditional PCs. In general, they are too cumbersome to run on smartphones. The rich documents also tend to have a large size. Storing them locally on a mobile device with limited storage memory is difficult. The previous approach to shared document viewing therefore is not generally applicable for mobile devices.